Grieving the Death of a Mother

Author: Harold Ivan Smith

A mother's death can make a shambles of schedules, priorities, agendas, commitments, and, sometimes, even our most important relationships. A mother's last breath inevitably changes us. Drawing on his own experience of loss, as well as those of others, Harold Ivan Smith guides readers through their grief, from the process of dying through the acts of remembering and honoring a mother after her death.

"The Dying Is there a clear moment that you can say "My mother is dying?" The phrase "is dying" can echo brutally along the canyons of a child's heart; many are reluctant to verbalize the words. Some have been outraged to learn of a mother's death: "No one told me she was dying!" Some refuse to hear the diagnosis. Some thought their mother had nine lives; she had beaten other diagnoses, surely she would conquer this one, too. Mom is invincible! In one sense, we are dying the moment we take our first breath, and we are living until we take our last breath. Some daughters and sons say the words "is dying" so softly in conversations one can hardly hear it. In other families, the reality is never acknowledged.